[quoteuser=“Lyle”]
A friend of mine asked me why capitalists shouldn’t have to share their profits with their laborers. I told him because it is the capitalist that fronts all the capital and takes all the risk. The laborer gets paid up front, even when no profits have yet, if ever, been made. He didn’t follow. So I asked him a simple question: Should laborers reimburse capitalists when they take losses?
[/quote]
I think you’re both missing the much more basic point. In a free market there is no such thing as a “profit system”…it is a “profit and loss” system. Anyone who says “workers are the reason the business owner has profits, so they should share the profts” also needs to be in favor of the workers sharing the the losses. If the company comes out in the red for the year, these workers who get to share in the profits should have to take a pay cut, or even put in some free hours.
And what’s more, a lot of employees do share in the profits of the companies they work for. Hasn’t anyone ever heard of “profit-sharing”? It’s in the damn name. Not to mention, anyone can buy a share of a publicly traded business and share in the profits. In fact, most employees do own shares of companies and share in the profits…and most of them are sharing in profits of companies they don’t even work for. This argument is just one more in thousands of example of people who don’t have the first clue of what they’re talking about. As I pointed out a while back…People bitch about ExxonMobil and “record profts” during times of high gas prices…
Better than 52 percent of Exxon-Mobil’s stock is owned by fund investors such as mutual and pension funds…much of which is the “working class” firefighters, teachers and other government employees that everyone seems to invoke when they want to seem philanthropic.
The whole thing is just one more example of utter ignorance. They don’t even know what stock they own…I doubt we can expect them to understand basic economics.
Here’s a great response to an ass-hat who made that same claim. (And here’s the followup.)